On face value, Blood Wake does little to stand out from the twenty other titles of the Xbox’s Euro launch – quite the opposite in fact, a cursory glance over the box suggesting some kind of ill-conceived boat ‘em up, with repetitive, linear and uninspired gameplay. Whilst this preconception might hold some water (if you’ll pardon the pun), it was all water under the bridge (sorry) once I picked up Blood Wake, and dived-in (dear God, no more, please) to this actually quite enjoyable water-based combat game of surprising captivations.

It’s even got a quite (I say that in the loosest possible sense) interesting story, based around you as some kind of Naval General, taking to the high seas to take revenge upon your evil brother – who betrayed you, and left you for dead. This premise binds the subsequent mission-based together nicely, the plot unfolding between missions via attractive animation on parchment, complete with some so-so voice acting. Well at least they made the effort.

As your missions increase in difficulty, you’ll be taking on all manner of water-born enemies from the confines your heavily-armed speedboat, and the missions span a number of diverse and graphically enchanting locales. Of course, this is a game of arcade values at it’s heart, so you’ll still find yourself equipped with a faster and most dangerous boat, as the game progresses; the foes proving equally taxing too.

Which leads me on to the water effects; they’re lovely, as you’d expect from a game in which you’ll be seeing quite a lot of them, indeed the explosions too are a sight to behold, in true Incoming-style. The controls are something of a downer, feeling decidedly ‘weird’ when compared to driving games, which can take a bit of getting used-to. All in all, nothing too terrible though.

Multiplayer Blood Wake is a bloody good laugh (I’ve gone pun-crazy), especially if you’ve got four controllers and four friends, in which case things can get very fun in some hilarious action-packed battles. Not that the single player experience won’t keep you going very long, but a game as action-orientated as this is always that little bit better when it’s your mates your beating, rather than some faceless AI bad-egg.

To conclude then, Blood Wake is a fun, if ultimately shallow game, improved by the plot and the game’s unique style, but still quite short-lived unless you’re really into this sort of thing. Certainly it’s pretty, and the adds a little more playing time, but the gameplay is pretty much the same throughout, if increasingly hard.

A fun but dumb…

79%

By Luke Guttridge